On Extinction by Melanie Challenger

Author:Melanie Challenger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2012-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

On our journey to the British research station, Rothera, we stopped at Vernadsky, a Ukrainian base on the Argentine Islands, off the coast of Graham Land. The oldest operating base in Antarctica, it was sold in the 1990s by the British for £1. The first to visit the area were the members of the 1897 – 9 Belgian Antarctic Expedition on board the Belgica. Under the command of Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery, the ship was originally a Norwegian whaler, its hull made of Norwegian pine, strengthened in greenheart. The first mate of the expedition was the then unknown Roald Amundsen. The tools listed in the ship’s inventory betrayed a shift from the vested concerns of the sealers and whalers to those of science. The vessel housed a magnetic theodolite and Von Steer-neck pendulum, a toluene thermometer for measuring low temperatures, a cloud atlas, and Le Blanc and Belloc sounding machines for oceanography. For zoology and botany, the ship carried a range of nets, harpoons and hooks, along with hunting rifles, dissecting instruments, and a botanical press for plants. Among the specimens retrieved by the expedition were five new species of mite, twenty-seven mosses, snow petrels, giant petrels, and Weddell and crabeater seals.

In March 1898, ice began to close around the ship, filling the interstices like swiftly healing wounds. Unable to progress, the men prepared to winter on the ice. The scientists set up astronomical observatories, communicating with the ship by telegraph wires. On 17 May, the sun set and didn’t rise again until late July. ‘Polar anaemia’ inflicted the crew, whose pulses sometimes rose to 150 beats a minute, at other times dropping to under fifty. They began to kill and eat seals, and showed signs of scurvy. One of the sailors died of a heart attack. One experienced fits of hysteria. ‘Another, witnessing the pressure of the ice, was smitten with terror and went mad at the spectacle.’

The base at Vernadsky was established in 1947 as the British attempted to secure their claim in the region. Only in the 1980s were modern facilities constructed. The buildings now housed laboratories and offices, a surgery and bathrooms, a balloon-launching building, a skidoo garage, a clothing store, a boiler room, a carpenter’s workshop, general stores, kitchens, and reputedly the finest bar in Antarctica. Operated by the Upper Atmosphere and Ice and Climate Divisions of the Ukrainian Antarctic Survey, the base housed wintering scientists who studied ultraviolet radiation, storm effects and plasma irregularities, and long-term changes in the upper atmosphere.

As we approached the base, a huge sign painted with a two-fingered victory V greeted us. We trooped into the building, past a small gym decorated with posters of scantily clad women, and into the bar. There the scientists handed around delicious, homemade vodka and we toasted the polar summer together. On arrival the few women on the expedition were informed of an old tradition that new females on the base should make an offering of their bras. Reluctantly, the other girls conceded, adding their bras to the strings of underwear adorning the room.

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